WATERS NAMED DEAN OF BU SARGENT COLLEGE OF HEALTH AND REHABILITATION SCIENCES

Friday, December 3, 2004

(Boston) – Dr. Gloria Waters, a widely published researcher and professor of communications disorders, will become the dean of Boston University (BU) Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences on January 1, 2005. The University's Board of Trustees voted this week to confirm her nomination as dean. She will take over from Dr. Alan Jette, a specialist in gerontology and rehabilitation, who will continue to direct Boston University's Health and Disability Research Institute.

“Dr. Gloria Waters is a well-respected scientist in her field,” said BU Provost ad interim David Campbell, “and we feel she is most capable of leading Sargent College in this period of great change related to American health care.”

Waters is currently a professor of communications disorders and chair of Sargent's Department of Health Sciences. A member of the faculty since 1997, she also has served as chair of the former Department of Communications Disorders. Her research interests include sentence comprehension in aphasia, localization of language functions, and acquisition of reading skills in the deaf.

Currently, Waters is conducting research on sentence processing in aging and dementia, as well as the neural basis of syntactic comprehension. This work, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is being carried out in conjunction with the Neuropsychology Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Waters served on the faculty at McGill University in Montreal as an associate professor and acting director of its School of Communication Sciences and Disorders prior to coming to Boston University. A native of Montreal, she earned her bachelor's degree from McGill and her Ph.D. in psychology in 1981 from Concordia University.

Boston University (BU) Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences is an institution of higher education, research and clinical centers whose premier academic programs prepare dynamic health professionals and whose research and leadership in the health and rehabilitation sciences is actively shaping health care. BU Sargent College is the only private institution in the country offering five nationally ranked graduate programs in health and rehabilitation sciences. For more information and to learn about degree programs in physical therapy, occupational therapy, communication disorders, health sciences, athletic training, nutrition, and rehabilitation counseling, visit http://www.bu.edu/sargent.